trust

Trust is the foundation of relationships whether business, personal, products, services, and even governments. Trust just happens to be the biggest potential opportunity for developing a corporate culture of engagement, building teams and delivering exceptional service to your clients, students, customers and employees.

Here are 3 fundamental requirements to build trust:

Competence

Do you have the ability, knowledge, relevant experience and resources to perform a specific task in your required domain of expertise?

We should each be skilled and knowledgable about the products and services our organization provides to a degree that we can speak about them with confidence and clarity. If you are a leader, this includes being educated and developing an awareness of the skills associated with leading others including authenticity, accountability, empathy, humility, strategic agility, confidence and a keen ability to keep your eye on the pulse of the team’s engagement.

Reliability

Can you be counted on to manage and honour the commitments you make?

Think about your track record and whether you follow through on what you say you’re going to do, then consider how others would rate you on your reliability. When a relationship of trust has been established, we can anticipate and predict how someone we trust will generally respond in a given situation. There should not be too many surprises when we are consistent with our behaviors, when we know we can count on someone, we trust their actions.

Sincerity

Do you present yourself with honesty and integrity?

Sincerity is our assessment of someone’s character and basic integrity. This is the most difficult element of trust to build and also where we place the highest value on deciding whether to trust. Interestingly, sincerity is the hardest to recover from when damaged. Consider whether you are genuinely humble, this believability factor creates a connection with someone and is the bridge to a trusting relationship.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “distrust is very expensive.”

Without trust there cannot be influence. Lack of trust ripples through the organization and manifests itself in failing employee engagement, low productivity, poor quality, high turnover and communication dysfunction including unhealthy conflict and team silos.

What influence do you have on whether a colleague, employee, client, student or customer trusts you and your organization?